Thursday, August 30, 2018

Let's celebrate a president who never stopped working -- Aug. 30, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Jimmy Carter, who turns 94 on Oct. 1, swung a hammer this
week at a Habitat for Humanity project in Indiana.

Sweating in the hot sun while doing manual labor may
not be most people’s ideal activity for their 90s, but the former president and
his wife Rosalynn, 91, have helped build homes for poor families for the last
35 years.

Carter says they “get more out of it than we put into
it.”

As we mark Labor Day by taking a day off, let us also
celebrate former President Jimmy Carter, working man.

When voters in the 1980 election sent Carter packing after
one lackluster term in the White House, his peanut business in Plains, Ga., was
in shambles. He had to create his next act.

An ex-president longer than anyone else, he long ago proved
his character and redeemed his reputation by living modestly in the same ranch house
in Plains he built in 1961, by refusing to trade on the presidency, and by
performing good works.

“The Democratic former president decided not to join
corporate boards or give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn’t
want `to capitalize financially on being in the White House,’” Kevin Sullivan
and Mary Jordan wrote in a profile of “The un-celebrity president” in the Aug.
17 Washington Post.

Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle
reportedly landed a $65 million joint book deal last year. Bill and Hillary
Clinton command hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single speech, and
daughter Chelsea isn’t far behind.

"I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame
other people for doing it,” Carter told the Post. “It just never had been my
ambition to be rich.”

Carter set to work writing books – and has turned out about
three dozen. He founded

The Carter Center in Atlanta, a nonprofit that prevents
and resolves conflicts, fights disease and promotes freedom and democracy around the world. He still
teaches Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains.

Studies show volunteering helps the volunteer live
longer, but Carter’s long life is also testament to medical innovation. Three years ago, his future looked iffy.

In August 2015, he said his melanoma had spread to his
liver and there were four cancerous spots in his brain. He had surgery to
remove the small tumor from his liver, and doctors then used a relatively new immunotherapy
and radiation treatment. Four months later, he was cancer free.

Maybe you saw news on social media in this month that
Carter’s cancer was back. A tweet shared 26,000 times and then another tweet with
156,000 shares asked for prayers for Carter.

Fortunately it wasn’t so.

The Carter Center tweeted on Aug. 22: “Stories in the
last day on social media stating that Jimmy Carter has cancer again are based
on old news reports in 2015. There are no updates to our last statement about
his health, and a recent scan showed no cancer.”

Carter has mostly refrained from criticizing the
current president; he says he prays for him.

But, he allows, President Donald Trump is “very
careless with the truth.”

This especially matters to Carter because during his
1976 campaign he closed nearly every speech with a pledge never to lie to the
American people. The country was bruised and battered by the lies that led to
the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Reporters groaned when they heard the pledge, but the
unknown Georgian impressed voters with his sincerity. Carter says he stuck to
his pledge.

“I think I went through my campaign and my presidency
without ever lying to the people or making a deliberately false statement,” he
told John Dickerson Tuesday on “CBS This Morning. “And I think that would be a
very worthwhile thing to reinsert into politics these days.”